Outriders Director Speaks Out against Shorter Games

Peter_Brosdahl

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The topic of game pricing has come up a few times during the last couple of months. Not too long ago, former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden spoke about the unsustainability of current AAA game development. He explained that perhaps instead of companies pouring many years and millions of dollars into game development, another option may exist. He stated that shorter games, which require less production time, could be the answer. A short time later, it was announced that both Xbox Series X and PS5 games might have their game prices increased.



People Can Fly game developer Bartosz Kmita recently gave an interview over at...
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Honestly, I both agree and disagree with the article. I agree in the sense that I don't think that shorter games are the answer, but it isn't as simple as that either. The problem with single player story driven games is their lack of replayability. Making them longer surely helps with that, but they need more variation to make them truly worth replaying. Despite Mass Effect games ultimately not having endings that were pretty much the same, the games themselves were massively replayable due to variations in each play through that were created by player choice.

A shorter game with greater variation could work instead of simply making the game longer and padding the completion time.
 
A couple of thoughts:

First is you can't please all of the people all of the time. Every game is going to have its critics, no matter how good it is.

But, a good game will certainly have fewer critics than a bad one.

There are a lot of facets to this. You can tell when it's a passion project for the developer. You can tell when the developer goes a bit too far and is trying to appease the fan base. And you can tell when a publisher is pushing something down the player's throats for a cash grab. And there's the video game as an art form case to me made too. There's the game that got rushed out the door before it's ready, and there are games that are in perpetual paid Alpha status. And a dozen other cases I'm not even thinking of right now. Video games can fall into all of that, none of them are mutually exclusive.

I don't think there's any one answer out there, just like there's not going to be any one universal video game that appeals to everyone.

I think the first line defense against rising costs in development are going to be better, more streamlined development tools. Sure, the development process gets more complicated as new features are added and evolved, but the development tools will also come up to the challenge.

Just like making a car today isn't anywhere near the same process as it was 50 years ago... the manufacturing method has changed to take advantage of new technology and methodology. Imagine if you had to write a AAA game today directly and entirely in assembler... The tools will get better, that will help to keep costs in line.
 
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